HOW TO – Make a M&M Sorter
This is an old project using a BASIC Stamp, but I still wanted to get it up here “Identifying color is easy with the new Texas Advanced Optical Systems TCS230 frequency to color sensor. This is a high-sensitivity low-noise light-to-voltage optical converter that incorporates on board blue, green, and red optical filters. The sensor combines a photodiode and an amplifier on a single monolithic CMOS integrated circuit with a color filter over the photodiode. What’s really neat about this sensor is that it provides standard RGB color values with 90% accuracy.” Link.
Our friends over at Treeehugger sent us their weekly round up – Getting use out of old 
I didn’t really plan using a $20,000 laser cutter on my 17″ Powerbook to etch a 19th-century engraving of a tarsier, a nocturnal mammal related to the lemur (also a book cover image, from 
Charles is looking for some help with a project, read the challenge and post up in the comments if you have ideas! “When you listen to music or speech in a noisy environment you have to constantly, continuously adjust the volume control: boost the gain when the sound level is low, reduce the gain when the level is high. For example trying to listen to a movie in an airplane, or to a program in a car. What’s needed is a gadget that automatically changes the gain of the amplifier, as a function of the average sound level, to reduce the dynamic range of the sound source — an audio compressor.”
